January’s Oculus Rift Updates Add Even More Social Features – VRFocus

In December Oculus rolled out several small improvements to its Oculus Home platform, including a new Dash keyboard and wishlist tweaks. For its first update of the new year, Oculus is concentrating on more social features for Oculus Rift, with a Public Homes Beta and Facebook Livestreaming.

Your Oculus Home can already be used as a social hub for you and your friends but with Public Homes Beta Oculus is taking that a step further. The update allows Oculus Rift users to open their home to the wider community, allowing them to show off their loot collections or snazzy interior design choices.

Oculus already has some homes for users to visit, hoping that the VR community will be inspired to open their homes to the public. Simply set your home to ‘Public’ in settings to be included in a rotating list of recommended Homes in the Home Menu. Or to see the roster of available public homes go to the ‘Places’ tab.

Of course, just like any home users may not want to allow full access, so there is a suite of tools to ensure a hosts safety and privacy. Hosts can accept or decline any request, can disable the “Public” option at any time, and also report abusive behaviour, mute visitors, and more.

Want to show all your Facebook friends and family how awesome VR is, in real time? Well, now you can with Facebook Livestreaming. If you want to livestream your VR gameplay just select the ‘livestream to Facebook’ button from the Dash menu and start playing. It must be noted that developers can opt in or out of the feature so you will find some titles won’t work.

Public Home Beta and Facebook Livestreaming are only available to those who have opted-into the Rift Public Test Channel, with a wider rollout expected later this month. There will be further updates and improvements each month so stay tuned for the very latest announcements on VRFocus.